Onboard cameras and a bit of experimentation allow astronauts to take highly detailed images of our cities at night and share them with the rest of us.Ĭhicago, Illinois, is home to roughly three million people, but the wider metropolitan area includes nearly 10 million. That “Night Lights” map, widely distributed on the Internet, helped many people visualize the world’s distribution of people and cities.Īstronauts circling the Earth have the wonderful vantage point of observing the nighttime Earth from 350-400 kilometers above the surface, taking in whole regions at once. Image ISS016-E-27034 was taken on February 1, 2008, using a 28 mm lens.Īt night however, city lights present the space observer spectacular evidence of our existence, our distribution, and our ability to change our environment.Ī few years ago, NASA and NOAA joined forces to present the first world map of the nighttime Earth using 9 months of data collected by the DMSP (Defense Meteorological Satellite Program) satellite from an altitude of 830 kilometers (1 kilometer is 0.62 miles) above Earth. Looking east from a location southwest of Ireland, an astronaut took this nighttime panorama of population centers in Ireland and the United Kingdom.
But what about humanity’s signature footprint-cities? By day, cities viewed from space can blend into the countryside, or appear as gray smudges, depending on the style of development and size of the urban area. They include the regular patterns of irrigated cropland, straight lines of roads and railways running across continents, reservoirs on river systems, and the cement rectangles of ports and seawalls along coastlines. To an observer in space, humanity’s footprints on the surface of the Earth are large and varied.
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